I should have known the satnav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what looked like someone's back garden in the Lot department. There I was, white-knuckling the steering wheel down yet another narrow lane flanked by walnut trees, convinced I'd somehow driven into a scene from a French film where nothing good happens to British tourists in hire cars.

The mishap came shortly after, and I blame the croissant I'd inhaled at a roadside boulangerie an hour earlier. In my sugar-fuelled haste, I misread the directions and found myself at a farm gate, face to face with a very unimpressed Limousin cow and a farmer who looked like he'd seen my type before. Reversing back up a gravel track in a Renault Clio that suddenly felt the size of a bus was not how I'd imagined my arrival at a charming stone property in Frayssinet-le-Gelat. My partner sat in silence, which was somehow worse than being shouted at.

By the time we actually found the right turning, I was half-ready to abandon the car and walk. But then we crested the final hill and there it was: a proper old stone farmhouse sitting among rolling meadows, with that particular honey-coloured light you only seem to get in the Midi-Pyrenees. The sort of place that makes you immediately forget you've just spent twenty minutes arguing about whose fault the wrong turn was. Spoiler: it was definitely mine.

The key was in the lockbox exactly where the instructions said, though I managed to drop the code sheet into a flowerbed while fumbling with my phone torch. My partner retrieved it without comment. I was not covering myself in glory.

Stepping inside for the first time, the cool of the thick stone walls hit me like a welcome slap. After the car journey, with its wrong turns and rising panic, the interior felt instantly calming. Beamed ceilings, tiled floors, that particular smell of old wood and lavender that makes you want to exhale properly for the first time in months. I stood in the doorway like a lemon, just breathing it in, until my partner nudged me aside with the first suitcase.

The kitchen was one of those gloriously practical French affairs, all terracotta and copper pans that looked like they'd actually been used rather than arranged by an interior designer. I immediately pictured myself looking competent with a baguette and local cheese, though history suggests this would end in crumbs and disappointment.

I made straight for the terrace, because that's what you do when you arrive somewhere in this part of the world. The view stopped me mid-step. Rolling countryside, nothing but fields and woodland and the distant suggestion of hills, with not a single other building in sight. I felt that particular holiday feeling creep in: the realisation that nobody knew where we were, and nobody needed anything from us for a solid week.

My partner emerged with two glasses of the wine we'd picked up in Cahors, and we stood there in companionable silence, watching the light change. The cow incident, the satnav rebellion, the dropped code sheet: all of it already softening into the kind of story we'd tell later with exaggerated hand gestures.

That first evening, we walked the perimeter of the property as the swallows started their evening circuits, too tired to venture further, too charmed to stay inside. I kept catching myself grinning like an idiot. The chaos of arrival had somehow made the peace of the place feel earned rather than simply given.

We didn't cook that night. We sat on those terrace chairs until the stars came out, talking about nothing much, eating bread and cheese with our fingers like teenagers. I thought about how I always expect holidays to begin cleanly, elegantly, and how they never do, and how perhaps that's exactly as it should be.